Following the recently released Preverb (offered as the first plug-in to realise reverse reverb in real time by putting a reverb swell before a sound instead of after), Low End Candy has announced Slingshot, a plug-in enabling echoes to be generated to play ahead a sound.
The so-called ‘sucked-in’ echo effect has previously been used by producers seeking to create the effective sound of a reverse delay as creating the effect traditionally requires printing a delay tail, reversing the audio, dragging it back in front of the note, and nudging it into place.
Slingshot solves this problem by building that run-up as an ordinary effect. In its default Aligned mode, it reports its lead-in to the DAW as latency, so the echo train lands ahead of the transient and stops wherever the sound starts; Live mode provides zero-latency monitoring while tracking. The resultant reversed echoes stack up and rush into the drop. Arming Capture enables a sound to be played once and have Slingshot print the lead-in as a WAV file trimmed to the transient and padded to a whole bar, ready to drag to the grid.
Features include: echoes that build into the sound – Feedback detetmined the number of repeats, time (free or tempo-synced) sets their spacing, while the display reads out the total (such as six echoes x40ms gives 840ms lead-in); an ability to drag the echo train sideways to change its length, up or down to reshape the crescendo, with a Spectro view showing the swell forming as a live spectrogram. Six (Clean, Tape, Analog, Diffuse, Ping-Pong and Filtered) delay characters are available, with each repeat running back through the character – Fwd offers clean copies placed ahead of the sound, Rev reverses each tap like the classic backwards-tape swell, while Grain is a sprayed granular cloud.
Tap modes include Pitch and Forasnt shaping, independently movable or linked for natural transposition; and Snap shapes the echoes’ transients on the wet signal only. Drive, Stereo Width and Room/Hall/Plate Reverb effects can also be added alongside a Delay Filter. Modulation comprises a single LFO with eight (Pitch, Filter, Stereo, Reverb, Formant, Mix, Shape and Drive) targets, tempo-synced or free.
Slingshot has been conceived as a sister plug-in to Preverb, where Preverb builds a reverse reverb – a single smeared wash that swells in and Slingshot builds aseparate reversed echoes that stack and crescendo, with feedback and six delay characters.
‘Every delay I owned echoed after the sound,’ says Low End Candy founder, Beau McLeod. ‘I wanted them running the other way, stacking up into the drop so that the track announces what’s coming before it gets there. That’s the whole trick – anticipation you can hear. Nothing I had did that, so I built Slingshot.’
Version 1.9.0 of Slingshot is now available to buy as a 64-bit AU or VST3 plug-in for macOS (10.13 or later, native on Apple Silicon and Intel) and a 64-bit VST3 plug-in for Windows (10 or later), with one licence key covering both platforms directly from Low End Candy.
See also: Low End Candy Preverb